


The Undone Year

by Vana



Series: The Wilfred Owen Project [1]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: ASoIaF Kink Meme, Alternate Universe - Military, Alternate universe - Vietnam War, Light Bondage, M/M, complete filth that's all!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-15
Updated: 2013-07-15
Packaged: 2017-12-08 20:05:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,557
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/765458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vana/pseuds/Vana
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>1972, somewhere in Vietnam: Stannis Baratheon and Davos Seaworth find some escape from the war's horrors. A good act can't wash out the bad, but somehow they keep trying. Decades later, Stannis starts putting the pieces together again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Undone Year

**Author's Note:**

> This was to fill a request in Round 16 of the kink meme for anything Stannis/Davos. I threatened that if the poster couldn't get more specific they would end up with "something involving rope burns, blowjobs in a helicopter, and explicit descriptions of what their sweat tastes like when mixed with the smell of turpentine and stale cigarette ash." And here it is.

You could barely tell where the rust ended and the paint began on that HH-43 Husky helicopter, lying bent and crippled in one of a thousand junkyards of the American Midwest. Once they had called her Black Betha. But over the years the rock salt and wind and weather had beaten the shine out of her body, leaving only a sooty, bruised look to her; briars and tumbleweeds decorated her where the U.S. Air Force emblems had once shone, arrogant and bright.

Retired Maj. Stannis Baratheon laid a hand on the cracked metal and peeling paint, and kept it there even when the heat of it stung his palm. It had dropped him out of the sky to meet the rainforest outside devastated Haiphong, and only the rope had arrested his fall before he reached down for the rescue. One knot had twisted and flexed between him and the writhing green ground.

\--

"The fuck did you learn how to do that?" Stannis fumbled with the cable behind him, his hands shaking with the vibration of the helicopter. He'd taken dives before, and he'd taken falls, but never had it seemed such a near thing.

"Navy," muttered the airman who had tied the knots that had saved him. He didn't look up, but batted Stannis' hands out of the way and in one, two seconds had him loose. "Saved your ass didn't I?"

"If you hadn't flown so fucking low ...!" But Stannis knew as he said it that it was wrong. The landing skids had hit the treetops exactly where they were supposed to. The precision of it had almost exhilarated him as he had watched. It was only after he had found himself in the wrong position that he cast around for something to be angry at.

Now Airman First Class Davos Seaworth looked up at him, a challenge rising in his eyes. "Did you want to actually get down there or--"

"Oh, put a lid on it, Jesus, would you fucking put a lid on it." Stannis was tired, deathly tired. He slouched back in his seat, his posture some kind of acquiescence, and Davos spared him one more sideways glare. Then he throttled Black Betha forward and they ascended, the rotor slicing violently through the air.

It wasn't a surprise, really, that they were always paired on these missions. Dropping destruction or cleaning up after it, they had a certain success rate together. "Baratheon, Seaworth," the commander would bark, "get in your goddamn bird ..." There was no need to waste words with them. Stannis thought it was something of a badge of honor.

Some badges of honor he showed, the stripes on his fatigues and the hospital corners of his bunk crisp enough that even the tight-ass commander couldn't find a flaw. The red welts on his shoulders and wrists wept on those tight sheets, sticky reminders of the ropes Davos had bound him with -- to a tree, to a closet door just before KP, to the post that was the very last remnant of a Viet Cong encampment. Davos could tie him to anything. The ropes bled him of the pain and blood, scoured him of the sins he would never confess. The burns stained his undershirt and his uniform and his rough sheets, and he counted them all at night and sometimes smiled, sometimes cried, every stripe stinging and singing its reminder. Some badges he hid. 

Nobody asked. Long before Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was a twinkle in a horny congressman's eye, the taciturn Baratheon/Seaworth dyad got their work done and they didn't talk back. Well, sometimes Stannis talked back, when they were hovering in Black Betha, dynamically stable despite the laws of physics which somehow Davos was able to subdue to his purposes. Stannis would talk shit as he unzipped the fly on Davos' fatigues and sprung his cock free, dark and pink and straining in his grasp.

"You want it," Stannis would say, nearly dizzy with lust, "look at you, you fucking want it, you’re so fucking hard for me right now ..."

"Shut _up_ ," Davos would say, and push Stannis' head down. Stannis took him deep in his mouth, sucking sweat and skin hard and greedily, feeling Davos lurch in his seat. The copter barely shivered. Davos spoke, he acted, and Stannis and science obeyed.

Cigarettes were everywhere, handed out like candy and littering the base like last month's bikini pinups. Davos chain-smoked when Stannis was down on him, letting ash fall into Stannis' hair, the dusty particles washing off later in the shower. Stannis watched the dirt that sluiced off him swirl down the drain sometimes, staring into the eddy, wondering when the war and its dead would catch up with him, and when his ashes circled the drain, would anyone watch? Then he would go find Davos, shove him up against a concrete wall and devour him with mouth and hands until the only pain left was the pain they gave each other. The next day his shoulders and skin would ache with the shards of metal and plastic from where Davos had lain him down on any piece of ground they could find, almost tenderly smoothing the lines from his forehead before turning him over, pulling him up to his knees and fucking him until he couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe, didn’t care.

When they went to Bangkok with the boys on a three-day, they waited, watching the whores in their tight shorts and red high heels pick up each of their buddies one after the next. Then Davos and Stannis found a 200-baht hotel room and locked the door. Davos turned on the shower and came out naked and goosebumpy. 

 “I don’t even know what you taste like when you’re not all fucking filthy,” Stannis said as he tackled Davos onto the thin, flimsy bed.

Davos shifted under him, slid his calloused foot up the back of Stannis’ thigh. Stannis blinked the silver specks from behind his eyes. “Find out,” Davos growled.

On normal days off, Davos spent a lot of time cleaning Black Betha. Stannis had to try to do rounds distracted and hard as a mast while Davos polished the copter, shirt off, wet in the humid air. “Stick-up-his-ass Baratheon,” the guys called him. If he started laughing at that, he would never stop. Besides, the situation was too dire to smile at or move any more than he had to. He felt about to explode with the seam on his uniform pants scraping uncomfortably against the side of his cock and Davos’ skin shimmering with the black paint in the heat, just out of his reach. Davos slanted a sideways glance at him, almost demure under half-lidded eyes, and Stannis felt himself pulse and gasp and he just barely made it behind a closed door in time.

Later Stannis licked the sweat from Davos’ chest, catching a nipple between his teeth, smelling the soap and the turpentine and the cigarette smoke. The chemicals stung the back of his throat as Davos clung to him, shaking uncontrollably and gasping out Stannis’ name. He had never been so undone and Stannis didn’t think to wonder why at the time, instead just drowning in the molten fire that flowed between them and staring up into Davos’ eyes as he came for the second time that day, dragging Davos up to and over the edge with him.

The next week Stannis was transferred to a base in Germany. His superior clearly thought he was doing the brusque Baratheon a huge favor, never noticing how Stannis paled at the news and how he nodded, dumbly, and held out his hand for the papers before turning abruptly to leave. He never knew how he got on the plane that night. He only remembered thinking, over and over like the recitation of a mourning prayer: We never even had more than an hour together. We never got to fall asleep in each other’s arms. We never got to wake up in the same bed. The miles opened up and Asia fell away behind him, taking with it Davos, the helicopter, the dense air and the memory of every stolen minute.

\--

It had been eighteen years. The telephone in his hand seemed a weight, a burden heavier than he could bear. But he had the number and he stared and stared at it and then he dialed.

“Hello?” It was a boy, maybe in his late teens. Stannis breathed in. Five words. “May I speak to Davos?” There they were. He breathed out.

“Just a sec.” He heard a rustling, and the boy spoke from further away. “Stan, go to the garage and get Dad and tell him someone’s on the phone for him. ... I mean _now._ ” 

Stannis could hear it in the kid’s voice, that natural note of command. He remembered it. He would never forget it. 

Then he registered the words. He swayed dangerously, just catching his hand on the edge of a table. _Stan, go to the garage and get Dad ..._

He heard footsteps, voices, a treble tone and one that was far lower, even and rough. The wood dug into his palm. The scents of the rotting jungle, paint thinner and a sharp salty sweat were upon him as suddenly as a west wind, blowing him home.

**Author's Note:**

> Title is taken loosely from Wilfred Owen's poem ["Strange Meeting."](http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/176833)


End file.
